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Voluntary Living Wage – a qualified welcome

The National Minimum Wage became law in 1998, taking effect the following year. It introduced different minimum hourly rates according to age bands. In 2015, George Osborne announced that for over-25s, the minimum wage would be renamed the National Living Wage and increased significantly. This was primarily a way of outflanking the Labour Party, which had proposed a lower rise in the minimum wage. The change was introduced from 2016.

Confusingly, a voluntary “living wage” has been in existence since 2011, arising from campaigning going back to the early 2000s. The Living Wage Foundation sets the level of the voluntary – or as we prefer to call it, Real Living Wage based on the cost of living. The aim is to provide a worker with the minimum pay rate required to provide their family with the essentials of life, which the statutory so-called National Living Wage does not do. Employers signing up to the Voluntary Living Wage undertake to maintain the pay of their lowest paid staff at the independently set level, and are recognised for doing so.

Here at Sheffield Hallam, UNISON first raised the Real Living Wage issue back in 2012. We therefore welcomed the University’s decision to pay the Voluntary Living Wage to our lowest paid colleagues from August.

This takes the form of a Voluntary Living Wage Supplement, paid to staff on Grade 2 (we do not use Grade 1 here) and the first spinal point of Grade 3 whose hourly rate would otherwise fall below that rate. There are over 100 people impacted by this move.

The Voluntary Living Wage was adjusted to £9 per hour in November, and affected staff should see that reflected in their pay packets soon.

Our welcome for this move is a qualified one, however, because the University has decided not to become an accredited Voluntary Living Wage employer. Also, the method chosen to pay the Real Living Wage – a supplement on top of basic pay – flattens out the pay levels for staff on Grade 2. Nor does the supplement apply to contract staff and casual staff who are not counted as employees, although it does apply to placement students and apprentices.

Nevertheless, the move is a genuinely progressive move that benefits a large number of workers, and we hope that it will be maintained in the years to come.